How your device creates "randomness"

Real-life football is a strange mixture of predictability and randomness, and recreating that situation is probably the biggest challenge when you're building a football game.

Generally, in a match, the better team should beat the weaker team, and over the course of the season, the (supposedly) best teams should rise to the top of the leagues. But we all know that it doesn't always happen like that - the 2015/16 Premier League season being the perfect example!

Football always throws up some odd results and the game has to try to recreate that. Take a cup tie for instance - most of the time, a top-flight side should beat a League One side. Every now and again, the League One side might scrape a draw. And on a rare occasion, the League One side might even win.

So for each match, the code of the game works out some general rules about which team is most likely to win, based on the ratings of the teams involved. As a very simplified example from an imaginary match - one team might have a 60% chance of winning, the other team might have a 15% chance of winning, and there might be a 25% chance of a draw.

But, here's the crucial thing. It's your actual device itself which interprets those rules and throws a "random seed" into the mix to decide which of the outcomes ends up happening.

And it's not just the match results. Your device also has to interpret the game's rules to randomly decide hundreds of other things within the game. How many injuries and suspensions you receive; what kind of players come up on the transfer market; whether your manager gets approached by another club; whether a brilliant young player gets recruited into your youth system… and so on.

That's not to say that all these things are completely random - if the game was just down to luck, then there'd be no point playing it. As chairman, the decisions you make will influence how likely each thing is to happen. If you sign too many aggressive players, you'll get more red cards. But it's up to your device to decide exactly how many red cards you get.

Unfortunately, some devices are better at creating "randomness" than others - it's all down to the type of device and the operating system it's running. Your device has to make thousands, maybe millions, of random decisions during each season of Football Chairman. So even a small variation in "randomness" from one device to another can create quite different in-game experiences for people.

Occasionally, some people's devices can seem to get stuck in a pattern where they throw up too many of the same outcomes. It might be too many cup upsets, or too many injuries and suspensions. If that happens, rebooting your device to free up some memory can sometimes "reset" the random seed and break the pattern of events.

But the other issue with "randomness" is that, when you've got millions of events taking place, there are naturally going to be some unusual patterns. Since the first version of the app was launched, there have been over 20 million seasons played. Compare that to real life, where there have been less than 130 years of league football. 20 million seasons of football are always going to throw up some strange outcomes.

But strange outcomes are part of the beauty of football. If it was all predictable, the bookies would be bankrupt and we'd all be millionaires. Stories like Leicester's Premier League win will always crop up and keep people in love with the game. Hopefully our app can recreate that in some small way… with a little bit of help from your device and its "random seed".